> A great poem is “about” a specific person or moment embedded in a particular culture, composed in such a way that it reaches across time and distance to resonate with readers outside that culture.
Why is this a criteria?
The following piece of metrical poetry from the Rig Veda, is of high importance to me, a bunch of vedic revivalists and connoisseurs scattered across the descendant cultures, perhaps to Indo-europeanists and comparative mythologists who study this in academic manner, even when translated into English. But I don't think most people outside this culture would ever relate to this.
Now, verily, will I declare the exploits
mighty and true, of him the True and Mighty.
In the Trikadrukas he drank the Soma
then in its rapture Indra slew the Dragon.
Now perhaps the LLMs can produce something which sounds lot like this, probably even in old Indic if they're trained enough on it.
But it will never have the allure of the old indic hymns, because there's no riddle to solve, no real riddle that the machine has hidden in the words. When reading the above hymn, whether in sanskrit or English, whether it's me or an indologist like Jamison or Watkins (who wrote "How to Kill a Dragon" on Indo-European poetics), we are trying to imagine the same thing the original writer had imagined.
In case of LLM, it's just a sequence of words that sounds cool. It may have no meaning.
Because defining "good" as "made by a human from the human society" is the easiest way to be able to go on and "prove" that "LLM poetry is not good" (these are scare quotes). She says she used this definition in "over thirty years of reading, teaching, and writing poetry" (this is an actual quote) but I highly doubt she would've found it necessary 30 years ago to define "good" as "made by a human" with this level of explicitness.
Edit: having read the whole FA, the closing sentence makes much more sense (and is also completely at odds with the definition of greatness given earlier):
"Operationally, greatness is measured when tastemakers put them in anthologies so that generations of readers can read them, tear out the ones that resonate, and tape them to their refrigerators."
> A great poem is “about” a specific person or moment embedded in a particular culture, composed in such a way that it reaches across time and distance to resonate with readers outside that culture.
Why is this a criteria?
The following piece of metrical poetry from the Rig Veda, is of high importance to me, a bunch of vedic revivalists and connoisseurs scattered across the descendant cultures, perhaps to Indo-europeanists and comparative mythologists who study this in academic manner, even when translated into English. But I don't think most people outside this culture would ever relate to this.
Now perhaps the LLMs can produce something which sounds lot like this, probably even in old Indic if they're trained enough on it.But it will never have the allure of the old indic hymns, because there's no riddle to solve, no real riddle that the machine has hidden in the words. When reading the above hymn, whether in sanskrit or English, whether it's me or an indologist like Jamison or Watkins (who wrote "How to Kill a Dragon" on Indo-European poetics), we are trying to imagine the same thing the original writer had imagined.
In case of LLM, it's just a sequence of words that sounds cool. It may have no meaning.
>Why is this a criteria?
Because defining "good" as "made by a human from the human society" is the easiest way to be able to go on and "prove" that "LLM poetry is not good" (these are scare quotes). She says she used this definition in "over thirty years of reading, teaching, and writing poetry" (this is an actual quote) but I highly doubt she would've found it necessary 30 years ago to define "good" as "made by a human" with this level of explicitness.
Edit: having read the whole FA, the closing sentence makes much more sense (and is also completely at odds with the definition of greatness given earlier):
"Operationally, greatness is measured when tastemakers put them in anthologies so that generations of readers can read them, tear out the ones that resonate, and tape them to their refrigerators."